


and you seem so bruised

by Windybird



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types, Twilight Series - Stephenie Meyer
Genre: 90s References, Angst and Humor, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Family Dynamics, Gen, Gun Violence, Multi, Panic Attacks, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, pre-pubescent angst, teach y'all kids gun safety
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-10
Updated: 2020-07-26
Packaged: 2021-01-26 16:14:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21376921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Windybird/pseuds/Windybird
Summary: Twelve-year-old Bella Swan doesn't know what she's expecting when she comes back to Forks for the first time after her parents' divorce. Awkward conversations with her dad in the backseat of the car, sure. Wandering around in the forest until she gets lost and has to wait for a weary search party to find her, absolutely. What she doesn't expect is moving into the Cullen household for an indefinite amount of time after her dad gets mauled by a bear, and she most certainly doesn't expect the growing suspicion that the good doctor and his family are less wholesome than they might appear.It's 1999, after all- who hasn't heard of Radiohead except Satanic cultists?
Relationships: Alice Cullen & Bella Swan, Bella Swan & Carlisle Cullen, Bella Swan & Charlie Swan, Edward Cullen & Bella Swan, Emmet Cullen & Bella Swan, Emmett Cullen & Rosalie Hale, Esme Cullen & Bella Swan, Jasper Hale & Bella Swan, Rosalie Hale & Bella Swan
Comments: 84
Kudos: 194





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> okay I know u guys are waiting for a new chapter on stswsmw but I genuinely could not stop thinking abt what a younger bella's relationship dynamics would b w/ the cullens so uhhh take this in the meantime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so I'm currently rewriting all chapters of ayssb because I feel like I'm straying from the Gillian Flynn-esque scenario I had planned in my original drafts, but I'll have a completely new chapter up by Sunday! thank you guys for your endless support and patience w/ my abysmal schedule :')

“You’re going to blow yourself straight into next week if you hold it like that.”

Bella huffs, attempts to readjust her grip, and promptly yelps when the butt of the rifle slams against her foot.

“Dad, you do realize this is completely hopeless, right?” Bella asks, wincing as she removes the rifle off her foot and onto the forest floor beside it, packed densely with pinecones and thick patches of grass, so tall they nearly reach Bella’s shoulder. Her hand is so slick with sweat that the rifle almost slips, and she has to readjust her grip to make sure it doesn’t fall to the ground. Though, if she’s being honest, the temptation to toss it as far into the woods as she possibly can beckons to her as it has been for the past forty-five minutes.

Charlie sighs and runs a hand through his thinning hair, and, for a moment, Bella feels a twinge of guilt. They’ve been out here for hours, Bella scaring off every living thing in a thirty-mile radius, and Charlie slowly losing patience, but the intense longing to go back to Charlie’s house- uncomfortable reminders of Charlie’s failed marriage to Renee and all evident in the pictures still hung up on his peeling wallpaper and all-, hasn’t been this strong until now. The sky is lifeless and gray from what little glimpses of it Bella can see above the canopy of trees, and there’s a harsh bite in the air, wind nipping at her skin through her new winter coat that Charlie bought especially for this visit.

He's trying, she knows he is, and she can’t tell if she craves it or is discomfited by it. Both, probably, but Phil is eons away from Charlie (both physically and metaphorically), and the latter’s desire to win Bella’s approval is both endearing and slightly repellant, like a slobbery Saint Bernard begging for attention from its owner. Phil’s always been affable but slightly distant with Bella, more like a temporary roommate than a stepfather of eight years, and she’s grown too accustomed to his impersonal friendliness to really appreciate Charlie constantly knocking on her door, asking if she wants to join him and Billy Black in their fishing expeditions, or watch the football game on Charlie’s outdated television set.

It would’ve been one thing if it was just the fact that Bella didn’t know how to interact with Charlie and vice versa, but being in Forks is a far sharper thorn in her side than awkward, fumbling attempts at conversation with her dad. Since she can remember, Renee’s been carting her off to Forks during winter break while she and Phil go gallivanting about the country’s many baseball fields, but it doesn’t mean that the biting cold of Washington has grown any more bearable in the handful of months she’s spent altogether in Forks since she was four years old. Besides that, being in Forks for longer than half a week is as fun as watching paint dry, and Charlie knows this perfectly well- it’s why he’s so eager to get her out of the house, try to distract her from the fact that there are justifications at every turn for why Renee traded in Forks for Phoenix, sunny and dry and resplendent with community pools that would’ve frozen in less than an hour in Forks.

“You’re the one that wanted to learn how to shoot a gun,” Charlie points out, and Bella rolls her eyes pointedly, even though she knows he can’t see her face. It’s the principle of the thing.

“I meant at a shooting range,” she says in thinly veiled frustration, struggling to wave her rifle around in the air, which she thinks pretty much proves her point. “Not murdering some poor wild turkey in cold blood!”

“Deer, Bella, not turkey,” Charlie chides gently. “And besides that, you should learn how to use a gun. It might help you one day.”

“You don’t even lock your back door, and you’re the chief of police,” Bella feels compelled to note. Charlie lets out another sigh, long and exaggerated so she’ll know he’s kidding, but she still feels her hackles raise in response. They’re not at that point in their relationship where they can rib each other, even casually, and Charlie’s attempts to indulge in the casual moments of fatherhood feel almost cheap to Bella, swooping in for a reward where no effort was made. On both sides, yes, but at least she doesn’t hold a pretense about where they stand on the dichotomy between awkward father-daughter relationships versus familiar father-daughter relationships.

“Okay. Here we go again,” Charlie says, and positions himself a few inches behind her, guiding her small hands with his own large, gun-calloused ones. They’re rough over her soft skin, and she frowns at the feeling- like sandpaper across your skin, although maybe that’s just her natural reaction to being touched by anybody-, but before she can say anything, he’s removing them and drawing her shoulders in close.

“What we’re working with here is a Winchester Model 70,” Charlie explains, and as much as Bella feels conflicted about her relationship with him, she likes the sound of his low baritone rumbling through his chest and against her back, warm and soothing as it was when she was a little kid and unable to grasp the fact that their relationship would inevitably turn awkward as soon as she hit grade school. “You’re standing in the bladed-off stance right now- your right shoulder’s facing the target, because you’re left-handed. The recoil’s a little much, but you’re probably not going to have to fire off more than a round, and your precision’s going to be better this way.”

“Whatever you say, Dad,” Bella says, feeling somewhat ashamed by her own internal monologue, even though Charlie obviously can’t overhear it. He’s trying so very, very hard, and they’ll never ease out of the uncomfortable state that they’re in until Bella stops making snarky asides in her own head about how crappy it is to be stuck in the ass-crack of Washington with a dad who’s comfortable only in the presence of his fishing pole or his rifle.

(Even if it _is _almost impossibly hard to resist when he drags her out into the forest to go on a hunting trip she never actually asked for, thank you very much).

“Now,” Charlie says, “you’re going to look through that open sight- that little notch at the front of the rifle-, and you’re going to squeeze the trigger as soon as you have the deer’s head in your line of sight. Squeeze it hard enough that you feel resistance, like this.”

He abruptly puts his hands at her sides and squeezes hard, and Bella squeals with surprised laughter, forgetting herself for a second until she feels the rifle wobbling in her unsteady hands. She tightens her grip and dutifully- if reluctantly- looks down the sight. There’s no deer, surprise surprise, but after a few minutes pass she sees something move in the shade of a redwood.

A baby cub comes into view, and Bella can’t help it- she coos. It’s adorable, all wide eyes and small paws, but she feels Charlie tense behind her.

“Dad? What is it?” She asks, craning her neck to look back at him. A lump of anxiety forms in her throat as she stares at his face; he’s never looked this high-strung before, the lines in his face more pronounced than ever, shoulders coming up to his ears as he scans the area over Bella’s head.

“When there’s a cub,” he murmurs, in a voice so quiet she can barely hear him, “there’s a mamma bear. Give me the rifle.”

“But-“

“Now, Bella,” Charlie says, voice steely and uncompromising. Bella reluctantly hands him the rifle, and he expertly lines the sight up with his eyes, turning around in a slow circle without moving his upper half.

“I don’t see her,” he says, and Bella releases a breath she wasn’t aware she’s been holding. “I think we’re goo-“

And then, as though brought forth from sheer dramatic irony, or just plain dumb luck, the mamma bear appears almost out of thin air. There’s saliva frothing in her mouth as she steps in front of her cub, her eyes fixing on Bella and Charlie’s figures in the distance, and, for a pregnant pause, nobody moves, sizing each other up.

Bella steps back instinctively, a twig snapping underneath her foot, and then the bear is running towards them, the dark fur on her body shining almost cinnamon in the sun, and Bella barely has time to scream before Charlie pushes her backwards with one hand and squeezes the trigger with the other, the shot ringing out in the relative quiet of the forest.

But the bear doesn’t topple over. Instead, it only seems to enrage her further, and Bella scrambles backwards as she swipes a raised paw at Charlie’s face. He cries in pain, letting go of the rifle, and it skids across the forest floor and a few feet away from where Bella is propping herself up with her forearms.

She lunges for the rifle, hands violently shaking, and draws her shoulders in before taking another shot at the bear’s back, all in one clumsy motion. The recoil makes her smack hard against the ground, the back of her head slapping against the pinecones scattered on the forest floor, and the last thing she sees before her vision gives out is the bear toppling over Charlie’s body.

She knew she was going to regret coming back home.

* * *

When she comes to, there’s a furious pounding in her skull, blinding fluorescent lights overhead, and a movie star leaning over her prone body.

Okay, so he’s probably not a movie star- the pristine white coat and stethoscope kind of give him away-, but he sure looks like one, all soft blonde hair and flawless skin and warm golden eyes, crinkling when he notices Bella’s awake.

Before he can speak, Bella asks, “Where’s my dad?”

“He’s in the ER,” The not-movie star explains in a soothing voice, and though she doesn’t particularly want to feel soothed just now, her heart slows its panicky pitter-patter at his smooth cadence, almost transatlantic in his clipped, even vowels. “Broke three ribs and bruised four others, but he’s in stable condition right now, though he did come close to puncturing his lungs. You were luckier than that, I’d say- just a mild concussion and a dislocated shoulder, most likely from the gun recoil. I gave you a mild analgesic- a little Tylenol, nothing more-, but I wouldn’t suggest anything stronger until the first few days have passed. How are you feeling?”

“Like I just watched my dad get mauled by a bear,” Bella says, deadpan, and the doctor’s lips quirk almost imperceptibly.

“I’m Doctor Cullen, by the way,” He tells her. “It’s nice to finally meet you, Isabella, though I do wish it was under better circumstances.”

“I mean, you’re a doctor,” Bella points out, groaning quietly as her head throbs in pain. “I’m pretty sure most of the people you meet are through unpleasant circumstances.”

“True,” Doctor Cullen agrees easily, “but I’d say, after experiencing it twice, that surviving a bear attack constitutes as a particularly unpleasant circumstance.”

“Twice?”

“My son, Emmett, was attacked by a bear a long time ago,” Doctor Cullen explains, leaning against the counter of the hospital room. “He survived, but it did leave some unfortunate side effects. Hopefully you won’t experience anything of the sort, though. A little head pain for the next few days, maybe, but nothing life-threatening.”

His pager suddenly beeps, punctuating the end of his sentence.

“That’ll be my cue,” he says, giving Bella a warm smile. “I’m going to check on your dad for a little bit. Sit tight, okay?”

“Okay.”

True to his word, Doctor Cullen comes back after only fifteen or twenty minutes has passed, though it’s enough time to lull Bella into a half-conscious doze. She jolts awake when the door opens, which in turn makes her headache worse, and she’s wincing in acute pain by the time Doctor Cullen closes the door behind him, looking troubled.

“What is it?” Bella immediately demands, dread seeping into the bottom of her stomach. “Is it Ch- Dad? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine, but-“ Doctor Cullen hesitates, before asking, “Bella, do you know Billy Black?”

Bella blinks, taken aback by this sudden line of questioning.

“Uh, yeah,” she says, propping herself up on her elbows. “He’s my dad’s friend. Why-“

“Your dad is going to be at the hospital for the next several weeks,” Carlisle says quietly, cutting her off. “He told me that he was going to ask Billy to watch over you in the meantime, but it turns out that Billy and his son are visiting some family in Jefferson County during the holidays.”

“Oh.”

“Do you have any other family friends that can take care of you while Charlie’s staying at the hospital?” Doctor Cullen asks, brows furrowed, and Bella fights the urge to press her thumb against the crease it makes right above his nose.

“They’re all Mom’s friends,” Bella says slowly, “and I haven’t seen most of them in ages. I don’t know if they’d take me in, anyway. They were kind of pissed off when Mom-“

She was going to say, _when Mom left in the middle of the night and took me with her like we were Wild West vagabonds escaping the authorities, _but figures that Charlie would be upset with her telling a respectable doctor about his messy divorce.

“-when Mom left,” she finishes instead.

“I see,” Doctor Cullen says in response, expression serious. “Charlie told me the same thing, but I’d hoped- well. I told him that you would be welcome in my home during his convalescence, if nobody else could take you in.”

Bella tries to struggle against the surprise and resentment that suddenly flares up inside. She doesn’t want to be a charity case, and more importantly, she hardly even knows Doctor Cullen aside from the fact that he’s the most handsome grown-up she’s ever seen-, but it must show on her face, because Doctor Cullen adds, “I have a wife and five children. You wouldn’t be alone in a lonely old house, I can promise you that much.”

“Five kids?” Bella blurts out before she can stop herself. “Are you guys Mormons or something?”

She winces, aware that was possibly the rudest thing she could’ve said to a guy that very generously offered her a place in his house for an indefinite amount of time, but Doctor Cullen just smiles, seemingly unoffended by her uncouthness.

“They’re all adopted,” he explains, voice amused. “Perhaps I should clarify- when I say kids, I mean teenagers. My eldest, Emmett-“

“The famous bear-wrangler,” Bella interjects without thinking, and Doctor Cullen’s smile becomes a full-fledged grin at that.

“-he’s eighteen, acts like he runs the world, though I suppose all eighteen-year-olds are similar in that regard. Rosalie and Jasper are a few months younger than him, and Edward and Alice are seventeen. I think you would like them. I’m sure they’d like you.”

“And your wife?”

There’s a twinkle in Doctor Cullen’s eyes when he says, “Why, Bella, are you asking me how old my wife is?”

“One hundred, right?” Bella asks, catching on.

Doctor Cullen’s smile is impish when he corrects her. “One hundred and four, actually. Soon to be one hundred and five this December.”

“Well, tell her I say happy birthday,” Bella says, still playing along, and Doctor Cullen’s smile softens.

“You can tell her yourself, if you’d like,” He offers. “I know, of course, that I must be putting you in an uncomfortable position, and I promise you I won’t be offended if you think of anybody else that can take you in, but-“

“I’d like to go with you,” Bella says decisively. She likes Doctor Cullen, she thinks, and his family seems interesting- certainly more interesting than staying in the hospital in a boring white room for the next three weeks until her dad gets better. “I mean, my dad said it was okay, right? But I do have one condition.”

“Yes?” Doctor Cullen asks patiently.

“I want my gun,” Bella tells him earnestly. “I mean, my dad’s gun. Rifle, technically, I guess. Point is, I want to continue my shooting lessons. Emmett knows how to shoot, doesn’t he? He didn’t just wrestle a bear with his bare hands, right?”

“Well-“ Doctor Cullen opens his mouth to speak, closes it, and then opens it again. “Yes, he knows how to shoot a gun. So does Jasper, come to think of it, though he hasn’t touched one in a long while. But as both your doctor and as a friend, I’m advising you not to use a weapon while your concussion is still so strong. Loud noises can agitate it further, and you need to focus on rest and relaxation this week.”

Bella thinks this over. Then: “Did I kill it?”

“Kill what?”

“The bear. The bear that gave me a bitch- I mean, bad headache, and broke my dad’s ribs. Did I kill it?”

Doctor Cullen’s eyes scan her from head to toe. She wonders what he sees when he finally meets her gaze, steady and tawny, almost yellow in the fluorescent lights.

“Yes,” he says finally. “We found its cub a few feet away from its body.”

The righteousness seems to leave Bella’s body immediately.

“That sucks,” she says uncomfortably, after the silence in the room becomes nearly unbearable. “What, um, what happens to cubs whose moms get shot?”

She can’t read Doctor Cullen’s expression when he responds.

“They don’t typically last the winter around Forks.”


	2. Chapter 2

One of the only prominent doctors in a small town like Forks is bound to have money, but Bella still feels her jaw drop as Carlisle’s car (he told her to call him Carlisle somewhere around the time they dropped by her house to pick up her crap, and she accidentally tripped over a hamper of her own dirty laundry in front of him) pulls into the driveway of the largest house she’s ever laid eyes on. She can hear Renee- a devoted and slightly obsessive real estate agent for the better part of the past five years- shriek with delight inside her head as she stares up at the mansion.

Because that’s what it is- a mansion, a two-story affair spanning at least 15,000-square feet, made up of tall glass windows framed by sturdy oak wood walls. It’d be no shelter whatsoever from the zombie apocalypse scenario that Bella’s been composing out of sheer boredom since the moment she’s stepped into Forks, but it has to be the biggest house in all of Forks, if not all of Washington, and that in and of itself makes Bella fall silent as Carlisle opens the passenger door for her.

Carlisle’s wife, Esme, stands up front, a gentle smile gracing her delicate features as Carlisle and Bella make their way up to her, Carlisle lugging what little Bella’s put in her backpack in one hand. Bella’s shouldered her rifle, and she sees Esme’s eyes widen a little when she finally comes within talking distance.

Still, Esme doesn’t say anything, only leans down to give Bella a sweet hug. Bella jolts at the motion- though she’s sure Esme means well, she can’t even stand Renee’s touch most of the time, let alone a total stranger’s-, but also because Esme’s skin is ice-cold, like she’d been standing in a freezer while she was waiting for Carlisle and Bella to arrive. Sensing her discomfort, Esme pulls back immediately, but the warm smile is still spread across her face when she straightens back up.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Bella,” she tells her, and Bella just knows that Carlisle called her beforehand to tell her about the name preference. The implication leaves her throat surprisingly tight, and it takes a few seconds before she manages to get out, “You too. Uh, thanks for letting me stay here until my dad gets better.”

“It’s no trouble,” says a low, masculine voice from just behind the threshold of the open door. “We’re always glad to have new blood around here.”

The owner of the voice squeezes through the threshold and stands next to Esme, one huge paw on her shoulder. He towers above her by at least a head, but his face is so flush with handsome youth Bella immediately guesses it’s their son. Though she knows that he’s not their biological son, he has the same translucent pallor as the rest of them, the same golden eyes and the bags underneath. She wants to comment on it, but bites her tongue before she can. She’s not going to mess up first impressions so early on into her stay with them, she’s just not.

“Emmett,” Esme says in a warning voice. Bella startles a little- in hindsight, it seems fairly obvious, but she didn’t even guess before now that this giant of a man might be the famous bear-wrangler.

Emmett just grins and squeezes his mom’s shoulder in response. “What, Mom? It’s true. We’re all so excited that you’ve come to stay with us, Bella. You and that gun of yours, I mean.”

Bella feels a smile threaten to lift the corners of her mouth, and it takes an effort for her face to remain impassive as she cranes her neck to look up at him.

“Carlisle told me you know how to shoot a gun,” Bella says, and then bites her lip, thinking over her next words carefully. “I don’t, um, want to impose or anything, but if you maybe could teach me- I mean, my dad was supposed to teach me, but he, uh-“

“I’d be glad to,” Emmett says warmly, putting a quick, merciful end to her rambling. For all that he seems like he’d be more at home in a wrestling match than in such a domestic setting, his smile is sweet and seemingly genuine, and Bella can’t help but feel comforted by it as she follows him and his parents inside the house.

The feeling of comfort is immediately subverted after Bella closes the door behinds her and turns around to see the most gorgeous girl she’s ever laid eyes on standing a few feet away from her. Her muscles tense the moment they come inside, her eyes swiftly zeroing in on Bella.

She’s the kind of girl who makes other girls beg their parents for a nose job the second they meet her, the kind of girl who you can tell has never gone without friends in her life, never had to trail behind a group because there wasn’t enough room on the sidewalk for three people. Bella tugs her sleeves down as far as they can go as the girl comes forward to greet them, her movements imbued with the lazy but predatory grace of a panther in the wild.

“Rose, this is Bella,” Carlisle explains, putting a hand on Bella’s shoulder. “Bella, this is my daughter, Rosalie.”

“Hello,” Bella offers, her voice so quiet she has to strain her own ears to hear herself. She doesn’t look directly at Rosalie, instead directing her gaze on a spot above her forehead so that she doesn’t have to meet her eyes. The cockiness she felt when speaking with Carlisle for the first time gradually faded during the car ride over, and the anxiety that’s replaced it balloons in her stomach so acutely, she feels a vague urge to throw up as Rosalie offers an insincere “hi” back to her.

Oblivious to Bella’s discomfort, Carlisle beckons her further inside the house, Rosalie and Emmett trailing in their tracks and looking uncomfortably chummy for foster siblings, if the arms they promptly wrap around each other have anything to say.

The rest of the Cullens are sitting in the grand, if minimalistic, living room when they finally come through the foyer, and though the TV is on and there’s a magazine open in one of the boy’s lap, the scene looks almost fake, like they’ve been posing specifically for Bella’s benefit. The boy that has the magazine in his lap tenses slightly as Bella nears, and though she guesses he’s beautiful- all long honey blonde hair and flawless skin-, it’s tampered down by the wrinkle of his nose. She smells ripe, she knows- she hasn’t taken a shower since the bear attack, after all-, but he could stand to mask his reactions a little better.

The girl sitting beside him hops to her feet. Bella immediately likes her, even as she proceeds to kiss Bella on both cheeks like they’re Italian or something. She has spiky black hair like she’s just gotten out of bed, and she’s petite, enough so that she’s only an inch or two taller than Bella. There’s a maniacal air about her as she pulls back, her eyes crinkled in a smile.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” she says eagerly. “I’m Alice, and that’s Jasper-“ she points to the honey-blonde boy with the magazine in his lap- “and Edward,” referring to the bronze-haired boy lounging on the couch. He gives Bella a perfunctory smile and greeting, but he doesn’t move from his spot in the couch, and neither does Jasper. Both of their muscles are locked so tight, Bella can just tell they’re going to be sore by the time they get up.

“Nice to meet you,” Bella says, when she suddenly realizes everyone’s waiting for her to response. “Um, I know this is short notice, and I just want to thank you for letting me stay with you. I don’t really have anyone else I can stay with, so. Thanks.”

She resists the urge to say that she hopes she won’t be a burden, but only because she doesn’t want to sound any more like a bad parody of Oliver Twist than she already does. They stand in an awkward silence for a second- awkward for the fact that Bella can’t stop fidgeting, and, what’s worse, she thinks that the expressions on Jasper and Edward’s faces are getting more twisted by the second, though surely she doesn’t smell bad enough to warrant the twin looks of disgust on their face-, before Emmett abruptly comes to her side.

“Before I forget,” he tells her, “you can give me the rifle. I’ll keep it locked up safe and tight in the shed outs-“

“_No_,” Bella says loudly, her reaction to the prospect of being torn away from the gun so violent it makes her jump a little. Flushing and attempting to soften her voice, she adds, “I mean, I’d prefer to have the rifle in my room with me. Just in case something happens.”

She realizes that’s not any better by the look on Emmett’s and Carlisle’s faces when they exchange glances with each other.

“Bella,” Carlisle tells her, voice calm and quiet, “you know I can’t let you have a loaded weapon by your bedside, don’t you? For starters, it’s illegal for a minor to have access to a gun without adult supervision, and secondly, I can’t in good conscious leave you alone with a rifle you don’t know how to use.”

Bella’s cheeks heat up even further, if possible. She opens her mouth to stammer out what’ll probably be an unintelligible protest, but Emmett is already reaching for the rifle, and so Bella has no choice but to reluctantly acquiescence the stupid thing to him. She tries not to dwell on it as Carlisle and Esme lead her upstairs, down a long hallway with creamy white walls and so many doors it makes her head spin.

Their stop is at the very end of the hallway, and when Esme opens the door, Bella can’t help but think there’s been a mistake. This can’t be a guest room- no guest room is this finely decorated. But apparently it is, because Carlisle’s guiding her inside, Esme standing in the threshold, and Bella has to shut her mouth when she realizes it’s hanging wide open. The room is beautiful, made up entirely of glass on one side, with a queen-sized bed and a bureau made of the same rich brown oak, offset by the baby blue walls. There’s even a small Sony TV sitting on the streamer trunk a few feet away from the bed.

“This is for me?” She asks quietly, turning around in a circle. Her room back at Phoenix was maybe half this size, her room in Charlie’s house half the size of the closet, and she feels, instead of gratitude, an immediate sense of wrongness. Instead of a reward for surviving a bear attack, this is a punishment- she will sleep on the soft, downy mattress while Charlie sleeps in a hospital bed, fitful as a newborn baby.

“Do you like it?” Carlisle asks, and though he’s too composed to be anxious, she can hear a thin thread of the stuff running through his voice as he looks down at her. She forces herself to smile.

“Of course,” she says, trying to imbue some peppiness into her voice. “There’s a TV and everything.”

Twin looks of sheepishness suddenly appear on Carlisle and Esme’s faces.

“We actually bought the TV for your arrival,” Esme admits, and Bella’s eyes widen. The sense of wrongness intensifies, and her skin begins to feel all tight and prickly underneath her coat, like the fabric is catching onto the little ridges of her scars.

“Thank you,” she hears herself saying, voice far off and as murky as though she’s spoken underwater. “That’s very kind of you.”

Carlisle and Esme exchange a look, but Bella ignores them as she sits on the bed, absentmindedly pawing at the soft fabric beneath her palms while she thinks. She knew that Carlisle and his family were rich, yes, but she didn’t expect them to be generous enough to buy a whole TV set _just_ for her. She had to wash Paul’s car for an entire month before he and her mom finally got her tickets to a Nirvana concert she desperately wanted to go to, and she’s pretty sure that a Sony TV set costs more than 1998 Nirvana tickets.

“Thank you,” Bella says again. “I don’t know what to say.”

Esme’s voice is sweet as honey when she says, “You can go ahead and unpack, Bella. I need to go grocery shopping, but while I’m gone, Carlisle can give you a tour of the house. Or, if you’d prefer to rest, you can-“

“Can I explore the woods?” Bella blurts out. At Esme’s head tilt, she clarifies, “I mean, outside your house. Can I look around out there?”

Esme and Carlisle look at each other over Bella’s head, and she tries to tamper down her frustration when they do that. She’s not blind. She knows that’s how adults communicate when they don’t want kids to be in the know.

“I don’t know, Bella,” Carlisle finally says, voice drawn oddly taut. “I’d much rather you stick around the house, at least until one of us can accompany you. But the kids have schoolwork to finish during the break, and I’m a little swamped at the moment with some business from the hospital. But I promise, you can run around rampant as soon as one of us can come with you. Is that okay with you?”

“Sure,” She agrees, giving him and Esme a small smile to show that she doesn’t hold it against them. “I’m just going to watch cartoons or something, anyway.”

“Remember your concussion,” Carlisle tells her as he and Esme file out of the room. “Not too loud, alright?”

“Scout’s honor,” she says, smiling wider this time as she holds up a three-fingered salute.

She ends up dozing off, though, until it’s almost dark outside, the last of the sun touching the oak floors of her room in a way that makes her feel like she’s in a Studio Ghibli film. Still groggy with sleep, she watches the dapple of sunlight play on the floors until the muffled scream from outside catches her attention.

Alarmed, she goes up to the glass wall and presses the soft skin of her palms and the tip of her nose against it, looking for the source of the noise. It didn’t sound like a human scream- it was more animalistic, more rough-, but it did put her on edge. It sounded like the same sound that erupted from the mamma bear’s jaws as bounded towards Bella and Charlie, although maybe that’s just the events of the past day finally getting to her.

The scream stops as quickly as it began, however, and though Bella strains her ears trying to hear anything else, the forest surrounding the house is as quiet as it had been in the afternoon. She shivers a little. In the dawning dark, it looks eerie, a forest that’s seen devastating animal attacks, little kids lost in the center with no route to find their way back to civilization.

She wonders how they found her and Charlie in the first place. _Who_ had found them. She makes up her mind to ask at dinner, but when Alice finally knocks on her door to let her know dinner’s ready, any half-formed questions in Bella’s mind immediately disappears.

The dining room is as lovely as the rest of the house, with a large glass table sitting on a pristine white rug and velvet-cushioned chairs, but that isn’t what causes Bella to blank on any coherent thought. It’s the food, the smell rich and heady, piled high on the table as though it’s Thanksgiving dinner.

Esme, standing behind one of the chairs, gauges Bella’s expression almost anxiously.

“Do you like it, Bella? Too little? Too much? I realized that I hadn’t asked you if you’re a vegetarian or not, so I ended up with both the steaks, the Caesar salad, the chicken salad, the fish, the-“

“This could feed a small army,” Bella says, looking at her with eyes wide as saucers. It’s true- even for eight people, it’s an insane amount of food, a huge bowl of pesto pasta on one end of the table, a pot of steaming rice on the other, and enough food to feed the homeless population of Washington sitting in between.

Still, as the others came to the room to settle down for dinner, she notices that she’s eating most of it, the others picking at the food with varying degrees of distaste on their faces. Emmett, at least, is making his way through a huge steak, but it’s been cooked- or, rather, not cooked- so rare as to be almost bloody, and Bella makes a face. She hates rare steak. It seems like such a morbid thing to put on your dinner plate- at least with cooked meat, you can pretend that it’s something other than what it actually is.

As they eat- really, as Bella eats-, Carlisle attempts to engage her in small talk.

“So, Bella,” he says, giving Bella an indulgent smile as she tears through an entire salmon. “How do you like Forks so far?”

“I lived here,” she tells him through a mouth full of food, and nearly chokes in her effort to swallow it all down before continuing on. “I mean, before my mom and dad got divorced. It was eight or nine years ago, but I still kind of remember living here. Sort of. You guys are the newcomers, right?”

“Something like that,” Carlisle agrees pleasantly.

“I don’t know,” Bella says, carefully avoiding the expletives that are implicit in her everyday thoughts about Forks. “It’s not really for me. I like Phoenix better, I guess.”

“And why is that?” asks Esme, leaning forward, eyes wide and focused on her face as though she’d like nothing better than to hear Bella wax rhapsodic about Phoenix for the next half hour or so. Bella spears a piece of broccoli and shoves it in her mouth so she can avoid talking for a few seconds.

“First of all, it doesn’t rain 24/7 in Phoenix,” she says finally, and Alice lets out a little giggle at the end of the table. Feeling emboldened, she continues, a little louder. “Second of all, this town is- it’s so small. You can’t really have any secrets. Not that I have secrets, but, uh, you know what I mean.”

When nobody says anything to that, Bella continues, aware that this isn’t exactly a prime topic of discussion for dinner, but feeling too uncomfortable by the silence to allow it to permeate further.

“And besides,” she says, “I can’t really stand the thought of staying in the same place that I went to elementary or middle school with- not in Forks, not in Phoenix. As soon as I graduate high school, I’m gone like _that_.”

She snaps her fingers for emphasis.

“I’m not coming back home,” she continues, grabbing a piece of steak that isn’t so bloody and beginning to cut through with eager hands, “not even for holidays. If my mom and dad want to see me, they can come visit me wherever I am, but I’m not going to come back here for the next ten years or-“

The end of her syllable ends in a gasp as the knife that’s been holding the steak steady slips and cuts her finger. She curses out loud and brings the injured finger up to her lips, licking the small bead of blood off the tip of her pinkie, and, looking like they had whoopie cushions under their seats, Edward and Jasper stand up in unison and stiffly exit the room. Edward’s fists are clenched so tightly his knuckles are turning white.

“What’s up with them?” Bella asks bewilderedly, just as Esme rushes over to her side and asks if she’s okay.

“I’ll look at it, Esme,” Carlisle says firmly, cutting the commotion off short. Soon enough, she’s sitting on the lid of the toilet upstairs, while Carlisle applies some Neosporin to her cut. Bella hisses through her teeth, but Carlisle’s hands are steady and don’t allow her to pull back.

“Are Jasper and Edward okay, or…” She trails off as he rummages around in the cabinet for some Band-Aids.

“They have an aversion to blood,” Carlisle explains easily as he sits up, finally locating the box of bandages he’d been looking for. Scooby-Doo themed too, Bella notes with a mental eye roll. Goody. “Can’t stand it, both of them.”

“Even from a tiny cut?” Bella asks, eyebrows furrowing. Somehow, that just doesn’t sound kosher, but then again, she’s definitely more accustomed to blood than they are. Maybe that’s just how normal people are- they’re squeamish with the stuff that runs in their veins, no help to it.

“Even from a tiny cut,” Carlisle affirms, tightly winding the Band-Aid around her finger. “There. All better. Now, why don’t you get some rest, Bella? Today’s been a long day.”

But her bedroom, in the dark, suddenly seems unwelcoming and cold. She shivers as she wraps her blankets tighter around herself, but as she tosses and turns before giving up and staring at the ceiling, she knows sleep is an impossible goal.

And then she hears it. The screaming again, coming from inside the forest. But even as she races to the glass wall, the cold air of her bedroom nipping at her bare arms and legs, she knows it’s different. Because the screaming doesn’t sound animalistic like before.

It sounds human.


	3. Chapter 3

Edward and Jasper aren’t at the dining table the next morning.

When she asks Esme and Carlisle, the former of whom is spooning generous portions of scrambled eggs onto Bella’s plate and the latter flipping over a newspaper like a dad in a sitcom from the ‘60s, they exchange a glance over Bella’s head.

“They went out for the day,” Alice interjects before either one of her parents can open their mouths to speak. “Went shopping in downtown Port Angeles.”

Bella tries to envision stiff-lipped Edward or Jasper- who has the air of a knight from at least three centuries ago- undergoing a teen movie-esque clothing montage, and has to suppress a snort.

“Uh, okay,” she says, figuring it’s best to just drop it. “So… what’s on the agenda for today?”

“I need to go straight to the hospital after breakfast,” Carlisle says, sounding apologetic. “But you have the run of the house while I’m gone, and I’m sure Rosalie would be happy to show you her vinyl records-“

“No.”

“What about the woods?” Bella asks, leaning forward in her chair so that her split ends are grazing the buttered portion of her toast. “I heard this, like, _screaming_ outside for a minute straight last night. It sounded totally satanic. Can I go check it out?”

“And what exactly you do if you found a cult in the middle of the woods?” Emmett asks, sounding genuinely curious. Bella puts up her fists and jabs at the air like a boxer, making little whooshing noises with every punch.

Esme sighs, but the sound is more affectionate than exasperated.

“Bella, if the sound you heard yesterday is because of an animal attack, I don’t want you to go alone,” she says gently, but the disappointment is still palpable when Bella slumps down in her chair. “Why don’t you and Alice and Emmett do something fun? You can go see a movie, you can-“

Bella sits up suddenly as an idea strikes her. “Let’s go to La Push.”

“La Push?” Emmett repeats, looking even paler than usual. “What’s in La Push?”

“The beach,” Bella says, shrugging. “Hiking trails. Trees to climb. Billy’s family lives on the reservation, I can go say hi-“

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Carlisle says slowly, folding his magazine. “You need rest and relaxation after the ordeal you’ve been through, Bella.”

There’s the sudden sound of a chair dragging against wood as Bella stands up.

“You haven’t even finished your breakfast,” Esme points out, looking pained.

“Neither have you,” is Bella’s quick reply. Knowing that she sounds like an ungrateful brat, she adds, “It’s okay, I’m not really hungry. I think I’m going to call my mom.”

“You can use the landline in the living room,” Alice offers warmly. Bella gives her a weak, tepid smile in return, before excusing herself from the table to do just that.

Renee picks up on the second ring, and Bella is momentarily taken aback by the flood of relief that courses through her upon hearing her mother’s voice.

“Bells!” She exclaims, genuine elation in her voice, and Bella can’t help the smile that immediately spreads across her face. “How are you? How have the Cullens been? Honey, I’m so sorry that I couldn’t be there with you, but it’s just that-“

“Paul has the championship game scheduled tomorrow, I know,” Bella finishes for her, with only a little eye roll. “It’s fine, Mom. The Cullens are- they’re nice, but, uh, they’re kind of…”

“Kind of…?” Renee repeats pointedly, when Bella trails off. She lowers her voice.

“Weird,” she mutters, sneaking a glance at the door to the dining room. “Esme and Carlisle are really nice, don’t get me wrong, but their kids are- okay, so there’s five of them, Edward, Jasper, Alice, Emmett, and Rosalie, and I know they’re all foster siblings, but I’m pretty sure they’re sucking each other’s faces when I’m not around-“

“_Bella_,” Renee chastises in a scandalized tone, but Bella can hear the perked curiosity beneath. Grinning, she continues on, twirling the cord around her index finger as she speaks.

“That’s not the weird part, though,” Bella says, soaking up the avid attention of her eager audience with relish. “So yesterday, I accidentally cut my finger, right? And Edward and Jasper immediately storm out of the room like I’ve cursed their mother six ways from Sunday. They’re high school students- you’d think they’d cut up enough pig fetuses in physiology class to not care about a little smidgen of blood.”

“I figure blood and gore is any teenage boy’s forte,” Renee agrees, and Bella can hear the smile in her voice as she speaks.

“And I’m pretty sure they all eat through their buttholes or something, because I haven’t seen any of them eat a single meal once,” Bella continues, uncurling her finger around the cord to gnaw at it between her teeth instead. “Carlisle’s a fu-_reaking_ doctor, and yet all his kids are poster children for various eating disorders. I think-“

She stops herself, suddenly aware of how ridiculous it sounds in her own head, but Renee can’t just let a thought go unfinished- especially when it pertains to conspiracy theories about other people.

“Yeah? What is it?” She asks, sounding less like a mother in her early 40s and more like a teenage girl gossiping with her best friend. Which is nice, actually- Bella hasn’t felt this close to Renee since she and Paul got shacked up, and she’s not even speaking with her face-to-face.

“I think there’s something up with them,” Bella blurts out. “Like maybe they did a hit-and-run a decade ago and it’s haunted them ever since. Or maybe they sacrifice lambs to Satan every fortnight and smear their faces in its blood. Stuff like that.”

“They’re probably just Mormons,” Renee tells her. There’s a muffled sound coming from the dining room that Bella thinks might be laughter.

“I don’t know, Mom.” Then, more plaintively than she sounded like in her head when she was rehearsing for this conversation, she says: “I want to go back home.”

There’s a slight pause, and then Renee says, a note of contrition in her voice, “Bella, you know the game is tomorrow-“

“I’m not talking about _tomorrow_,” Bella says, thoroughly rolling her eyes this time. “I’m talking about later on. After Paul’s league’s championship, after all the fancy dinners. I want to go back home to Arizona. Dad’s going to be out cold for another three weeks, and I don’t want to be a burden on the Cullens- aside from the general weirdness, they really are nice, and I just end up feeling so uncomfortable around them for stupid reasons.”

“You’re like your father,” Renee says suddenly, and Bella blinks in surprise. “You don’t want to owe people, that’s why you’re all fidgety. You feel like staying in their house and eating their food is going to cause you to owe them in the long run.”

“Wow,” Bella says, duly impressed. “You should listen to your shrink more often; that’s some solid analysis.”

“Hardy-har-har, Bella,” Renee says dryly.

Sobering up, Bella looks off into the distance, watching tree branches outside sway back and forth in the wind like elongated limbs. It’s a cold day, even by Washington standards, and though she’s safely inside, she can’t help but shiver.

“It’s just…” She takes a deep breath. “Why did Carlisle even offer for me to stay with him and his family? He doesn’t know me. I could be a serial killer, for all he knows. It just doesn’t make sense. I want to go back home where stuff does.”

“I can’t, Bella,” Renee says, apologetically but firmly. “I can’t take care of you right now; it’s just not a good time for me to go traipsing off halfway across the country. Besides, Paul needs my support, and I-“

“_I_ need your support,” Bella snaps, tears stinging at her eyes. “Me. Your daughter. Remember her, huh?”

“Bella-“

But she slams the landline down before Renee can finish that sentence, feeling shaky and panicky and somehow claustrophobic, even though the living room in its entirety is bigger than the first floor of Charlie’s house. Struggling to calm herself down, she flops down onto the couch and grabs either side of her head, staring unseeingly at her scuffed shoes on the polished hardwood floor.

She doesn’t know why she’s so affected by this. Renee isn’t exactly reliable, after all (once, when Bella was nine, she forgot to pick her up from school and Bella had to call her with the phone in the main office. It was embarrassing for them both). But it feels different somehow, with Charlie being gone and her staying in the company of strangers- even though she ought to have known better, she’s always figured that, if she really needed her to, Renee would come rushing to her side. But she isn’t, and now Bella’s stuck with people who probably resent her already for her dumb mood swings, and her total ungratefulness, and her-

“Put your head between your legs,” murmurs a voice from above her, and Bella’s head snaps up to see Alice in front of her, so close that Bella can see the flecks of gold in her tawny eyes. At Bella’s questioning glance, Alice adds, “Just trust me. It’ll help.”

Wary, Bella complies, and after a few deep breaths, is surprised to find that she actually does feel a little better. When she looks back up, Emmett has joined Alice’s side, a smile on his face that’s so genuinely friendly, Bella feels immediately guilty for gossiping about his family behind his back.

“Where’d you learn how to do that?” Bella asks curiously. Alice glances at Emmett hesitantly, and whatever she sees in his face must encourage her, because soon enough she’s turning her warm gaze back to Bella and taking a deep breath.

“I used to have panic attacks,” she admits. “When I was a- when I was younger. They got worse as my seizures got worse, so it was a bit of a never-ending cycle of staving off one attack only to be hit square in the face with another. Someone at the… institution… I was in, gave me the only piece of advice I ever listened to there, and I’ve been following it ever since.”

“You were in a mental in-“

“We came to ask if you wanted to go bike-riding,” Emmett interrupts with good cheer. “We just remembered we have some old bikes stashed away outside, if you wanted to have a go at them.”

“First of all, Carlisle says I shouldn’t do any ‘strenuous activities’ until my concussion is gone,” Bella tells him, using air quotes and raising her eyes heavenward to show them just how unfair she thinks that piece of advice is. “And second of all-“ she stops, flushing, but musters up whatever courage she has and admits, “I don’t know how to ride a bike.”

“You’re twelve,” Emmett says, as though she doesn’t know how old she is. She glares up at him, tilting her chin defiantly.

“I _know_."

“What Emmett means to say,” Alice says, elbowing her foster brother in the ribs in a way that doesn’t look like it hurt in the slightest (though Bella still appreciates the effort regardless), “is that we’d love to teach you. If you’d like to try, that is.”

“My head-“

“We promise not to let you crack your head open on the pavement,” Emmett vows, crossing his heart for good measure, and Bella, for all her posturing, can’t help but smile at that.

“Do I have to wear a helmet?” She asks tentatively, and Alice and Emmett look at each other before putting both of their hands on their hips simultaneously. If it wasn’t so intimidating, Bella would be impressed by their synchronization.

“Yes,” they say in unison.

“Oh, great.”

* * *

But as Bella teeters to and fro on a rusty Schwinn that looks like it hasn't been used in decades, she has to admit she's having fun. Emmett's riding circles around here on a tiny pink thing she's pretty sure was meant to be given to an eleven-year-old girl and not a bulky high school senior, but his elation is infectious, and besides, she's more concerned with listening to Alice's patient advice than worrying if the bike frame is going to give way under Emmett's butt, overfilling the faded purple seat. 

"Just take your feet off at first and glide," Alice instructs, her own pearly white bike sitting neglected on the sidewalk nearby as she keeps a hold on Bella's shoulder. "Your sense of balance is good, but you end up getting panicked and start to wobble back and forth. You need to believe in yourself before you believe in the bike."

"What Hallmark card did you get that off from?" Bella inquires sardonically, but finds herself following Alice's words regardless. Still, after maybe seven or eight seconds of gliding, the soles of her feet immediately slap down on the pavement, heart pounding fast in her chest. It's not that she's afraid- she's _not _afraid of some dumb bike; she's twelve, for Chrissakes-, but she doesn't want to make a fool of herself in front of Alice and Emmett (and Esme, who's trying to surreptitiously watch them from the living room window and failing miserably). 

"That was good!" Alice cheers, as she walks over to Bella's side. "Now we're going to do something a bit more radical. You're going to put your feet on the pedals, grab onto the handlebars, and I'm going to hold your torso from behind until you find that self-confidence we need. Okay?"

Before Bella can respond, her hands are already on either side of Bella's ribs. Bella automatically brings her feet up to the pedals, and before she knows it they're in motion, Alice a steady presence behind her and the ground staying perfectly solid beneath the wheels of the bike. She laughs breathlessly, enjoying the wind whipping past her hair and face, and can barely hear Emmett's answering laugh in the background over the sound of her beating heart. 

Back in seventh grade, they had a summer reading list for English class, and Bella had to pick one book off the list to deliver a report on for the very first day of school. She figured it would suck regardless of what book she chose, but The Bell Jar was on there, and the moment she read about the Rosenburgs being fried up, she was hooked. But her favorite scene was smack dab in the middle, when Esther was swimming in the ocean, past the friends she was with, and listened to the old brag of her heart: _I am, I am, I am._

Bella listens to the old brag of her heart now, and then she pedals fast enough that Alice's hands are snatched off her ribs and she's supported by nothing at all, only the force of the wheels tearing down the road, and throws her head back and laughs loud and hard. Taking her eyes off the road is probably not a good idea, though, because the front wheel hits a deep pothole so suddenly she barely registers it, until she's being thrown off the bike and up into the air. It's almost like flying, she thinks dazedly before bracing for impact.

But instead of hitting the hard ground beneath her, she lands into something else instead. Alice's arms are tight around her as she cradles her close to her chest like a baby, and though Bella barely has any wriggle room, she squirms and scrabbles her way out of Alice's arms anyway.

"How did you catch me so fast?" She gasps, looking at her with wide eyes. "You were all the way back there."

"No, I wasn't," Alice says calmly, just as Emmett swerves over to meet them. "I pedaled over here when I saw you were going down the street at a hundred miles an hour."

"No," Bella says, shaking her head. Oddly enough, the adrenaline from riding a bike for the first time (and being flung off of it) is fading off fairly quickly, and she's left with a leaden feeling in her arms and legs. "No, I know what I saw. You couldn't have caught me so quickly unless you're the Flash. Or something."

"Maybe I am," Alice says, grinning impishly. "You know, Bella, you could just say 'thank you for saving my life' instead of trying to be so nonchalant. I won't judge."

"And hey- look on the bright side!" Emmett chirps, putting a large foot down on the pavement to balance himself. "You rode your first bike. Charlie'll be happy to hear that when he's out of the hospital, I bet."

"I think he'll be more happy to be out of the hospital than the fact that his eighth-grader knows how to ride a bike," Bella tells him, deadpan, "but I appreciate the intent." 

As they walk back to the house, casting a long shadow over the lawn in the dimming afternoon light, she and Emmett squabbles over whether or not she could theoretically ride a marathon by the end of the year. As their argument dies down, Bella can't help but the bruises beginning to form on the tender skin where Alice's arms made contact with her body, and the fact that there seems to be no matching bruises on Alice herself. 

Alice catches her suspicious look before she can turn away.

"What is it?"

"You'd tell me if you were a superhero, right?" Bella wonders, feeling ridiculous for asking but compelled to ask anyway. 

"What makes you think I'm not?" Alice asks slyly, though she looks oddly relieved by the question. "For all you know, I have magic powers and can turn teacups into toads, and overly inquisitive twelve-year-old girls into the books stuffed at the back of the shelves in the library that nobody ever reads."

Bella gasps, mock affronted. "You wouldn't dare."

"Try me."

But as they step back into the warmth of the house, leaving the slowly dying sunlight- or what little of it there was today, anyway- behind them, Bella has the sneaking suspicion that her questions really are getting to Alice and the others. Maybe being uncomfortable around twelve-year-old girls is a universal thing, but when Bella questions her about the lack of bruises on Alice's porcalain-pale skin, she's pretty sure the stiff jolt that springs up her back isn't ordinary. 

She laughs it off, but when Esme calls them in for dinner, she darts off to the kitchen like a mouse scampering across the floorboards. As Bella stares at the shutting door in bewilderment, Emmett presses one huge paw on Bella's shoulder, and she nearly buckles under the weight.

"That was fun today, wasn't it?" He asks, cheerful as ever. "I wish I brought a camera with me while you were sailing through the air like a rag doll. It would've made a very promising start to my new photography collection. I call it: Bella the Klutz, an expose into the real reason why Bella Swan is constantly tripping over her own two feet."

"Two wheels, not feet," Bella corrects instinctively, causing another squabble that lasts throughout dinner. But even as she ducks away from Emmett's attempted noogie, spewing mashed potatoes and roast chicken anywhere and essentially proving his point even further (at least according to _him)_, Alice's timely rescue stays in the back of her mind, her bruises slowly becoming a painful reminder with every throb. And when she looks up from her plate and catches Alice's eyes on her, she has a feeling she's not the only one. 


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so this is thankfully the last chapter I'm going to edit before moving on w/ the rest of the story- like I said before, I had intended more of a Gillian Flynn-esque tone than what I first came up with. There were some inconsistencies with Bella's character without the edits- in my head I picture her more as a lonely and withdrawn twelve-year-old girl who has moments of vitriolic sarcasm due to feeling alienated by others rather than being a 2000s Disney Channel original movie kid sister character whose personality is derived of sassy one-liners and wearing bedazzled shirts like "I SPEAK FLUENT SARCASM" etc. that came out originally, u know?

Edward and Jasper come back after a week.

According to Esme, their visit to Port Angeles evolved into a seven-day road trip across Washington, and though Bella is positive Renee and Charlie would kill her should she ever try to pull a stunt like that, Esme fawns over them in the driveway while Carlisle smiles indulgently from the doorway.

They look better, somehow- more blood in their veins, Bella supposes, if the slight flush in both their faces is any indication. Less prone to collapsing on the floor due to iron deficiencies. But they’re still pale as ivory, and when Jasper puts his hand on her shoulder in greeting, still cold as ice.

“Hi, Bella,” he says quietly, and though his skin looks a little too stretched over his bones, there’s a genuine smile on his lips. “How have you been? How’s the concussion?”

“Good,” she responds warily. “I mean, not _good-_good, it’s a concussion, but it’s just about over, so that’s, uh, good. Where _were_ you guys? My mom would kill me if I left the house for an entire week without warning.”

Jasper and Edward give each other frustratingly meaningful looks that Bella can’t begin to decipher, but just as Edward opens his mouth to speak, Alice is suddenly hurtling down the hallway and into Jasper’s arms, so enthusiastically that they both land on the floor with a thud that makes Bella wince in sympathy. And then she winces for an entirely different reason when Alice plants sloppy kisses all over his face.

Emmett explained it to her when she caught he and Rosalie making out in the living room one early morning when Bella couldn’t sleep, keeping a watchful ear out for any more ghoulish howling in the woods as she was. They leapt away from each other the second Bella’s feet touched the bottom stair, but it was too late- there was no mistaking their entwined limbs and gross saliva-sharing sounds.

Emmett explained that it wasn’t a Flowers in the Attic situation at all, that Carlisle and Esme never officially adopted them because they knew that they, along with Jasper and Alice, were romantically inclined towards one another, but as Bella stood mutely in her pajamas, listening to Emmett’s rambling, she knew she didn’t really care about the fact that they were together, and more about the fact that this just further solidified the fact that she never, ever, _ever _wanted to be with another person like that. Ever.

She’s always felt like that, really, but when she tentatively brought it up with Renee last year, she just dismissed it as Bella being too young to even consider having a relationship, and Bella would rather slam her pinkie in a car door than bring it up with Charlie. So she just kind of pushed it out of her mind until now, where she was being perpetually surrounded by couples- Emmett and Rosalie, Alice and Jasper, Carlisle and Esme; it seemed that pretty much everyone but she and Edward had somebody, and while she’s perfectly fine with that, she senses a familiar gleam of discomfort in Edward’s eyes as he slowly backs away from where Alice and Jasper are still embracing on the floor.

“This is going to go on for a while,” says a voice above her head, and when Bella looks up, to her immense surprise, it’s none other than Rosalie, examining her perfect cuticles with a bored expression.

Bella wants to point out that she and Emmett are just as bad, but she also doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of one of Rosalie’s withering glares, so instead she just gives her an awkward smile. Then, hesitantly, “Are they always like this?”

Rosalie snorts without humor.

“They’ve been like this for years,” she says. “When the person who Drew Barrymore wants to be and the perfect Southern gentleman get together, you get used to bile-inducing professions of love all over the place.”

“Aw, Rose,” Emmett grins, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her in close, “where would I be without your caustic wit and devastating eye rolls?”

She rolls her eyes at him now, and while they squabble, Bella inches towards Carlisle’s side. He’s watching the “kids” with a fond expression on his face, Esme’s head leaning against his shoulder, and though they look like the model of an almost nauseatingly perfect American family, Bella feels something tight and wrong settle in the pit of her stomach.

“Carlisle,” she whispers, not knowing why she’s whispering, “can I go outside? My concussion’s basically gone, and I- I think I need some, um, alone time.”

Carlisle gives her a concerned look. “Are you sure you’re-“

“Yes. I mean, whatever the question is, yeah.”

Carlisle gives her a brief smile at that.

“Okay,” he says, though he sounds reluctant. “Just don’t go too far from the house, and don’t go into the woods until one of us can come with you. That alright, Bella?”

“Sure.”

It’s only when she closes the front door behind her that she feels the dread in her stomach start to ease up. She closes her eyes and breathes, savoring the quiet of the morning that she always thought was much too quiet before now, before she became roomies with five teenagers that seem to be awake in the wee hours of the morning.

Then, quickly glancing back over her shoulder, she sets off in the direction of the woods. She feels only a slight twinge of guilt as she does so- yes, okay, Carlisle _did_ tell her to wait for somebody to come with her, but she’s been stuck with at least one Cullen hovering over her shoulder these past several days, and besides that, she doesn’t think they’d be amenable to going on a hunt for whatever animal’s been screeching at the top of its lungs for the past week.

Still, she thinks, even as she pushes a branch out of her way and delves further into the woods, that this isn’t the brightest idea she’s ever had. After all, the last time she was in the woods, she barely survived a bear attack and Charlie’s face got nearly clawed off. But Emmett’s kept her rifle under lock and key, and she can’t bring herself to resent gun safety laws (she blames Renee’s parenting for that), so the tiny pocketknife in her jeans is going to have to suffice for the time being.

She hums a little under her breath as she walks, but stops when she hears the very distinct sound of a foot stepping on a twig just a few feet to her left. Freezing, her hand drifts to the pocketknife just as the monster in question steps out of the brush. It’s a rabbit, all twitching ears and cotton-puff tail, and Bella heaves a sigh of relief as she steps back to let the rabbit pass her.

When she looks down, she notices that the footprints it leaves behind are faint red with blood.

“Um, okay,” she says out loud, just to hear herself say something, just to break the eerie quiet that’s fallen after the rabbit’s hopped away. Still, the sound of her own voice- croaky and high-pitched with sudden fear-, doesn’t inspire much confidence as she slowly makes her way in the opposite path of the rabbit.

The smell is what gets to her first. It’s nauseatingly thick where it hangs in the air, the smell of a butcher shop bottled and perfumed and spritzed into the air. It’s the smell of rotten flesh, Bella dimly registers, and yet her feet seem to have taken a mind of their own, because they keep pressing forward, closer to the source of the smell, even though she knows what it is.

But it doesn’t prepare her for the mountain of animal carcasses that greets her as soon as she steps around a nearby oak. She immediately heaves at the sight, hand flying up to her mouth as the other grabs the trunk of the oak for support. It’s a massacre, piled too high to be the work of a particularly hungry grizzly- and yet Bella cannot imagine, for a single second, what could compel somebody to go on a killing spree across the forest, hunting down friendly woodland critters and slinging them into a pile of their fellow fallen brethren.

She forces herself to look up, after a horrible minute or two has passed. It seems that the killer was out for every part of the animal kingdom, because there are rabbits and squirrels as well as mountain lions and elk. Maggots have settled into the glazed eyeballs of a nearby bear, and Bella doesn’t bother to fight the nausea this time- she drops to her knees and vomits a few feet away from the pile, in deep, overpowering heaves that leaves her feeling hollow and shaken afterwards.

That’s not the worst part, though. The worst part is, when she allows herself to look up at the top of the pile, it isn’t just a poor heron or blacktail deer laying there (although that would’ve been awful, obviously, in and of itself). No, the last victim- and the latest, if his still-bleeding wounds are any indication- is a man.

His blue baseball cap is still perched on his salt-and-pepper head, his open eyes blue as anything as they stare unseeingly into Bella’s face. He rests on top of the corpse of a black bear, his hand flung carelessly across its fur and his shin- pale and vulnerable- is bent in an angle that causes Bella’s to twitch in sympathetic pain. His bare chest is so riddled with wounds that it’s hard to tell which killed him, but Bella supposes vaguely that it was his torn-out throat, exposing the inside of his esophagus so obscenely that Bella immediately bends over and has another vomiting fit, though she was sure she’d expelled all that she’d eaten that day in the first one.

She figures- after she’s regained some semblance of rational thought, after a good, long while of staring at the pile with her lips coated in sick- that it’s probably best not to stick around the area where a ruthless killer has very obviously been just a few hours before, and so it’s with shaky legs that she stumbles blindly back to the house.

She only realizes she’s been screaming the entire when the house finally comes into view and Jasper dashes out like a bat out of hell. As he collapses onto his knees and gathers her close to his chest, her mouth is open against his shirt and making muffled, choked sounds, and she’d be mortified by the idea that she’s getting vomit and tears and drool all over him if she wasn’t still reeling from the fact that she’d stumbled onto a crime scene more horrifying than anything Charlie had ever seen, in all his years on the police force.

“Jas- Jasper-“ she begins, but her throat clenches around the sound and what comes out is a low, keening sob of despair, so animalistic that some vague part of her is frightened by her own violent reaction. She presses her face closer against his neck, for once relishing the coldness of his skin against her sweaty forehead, and when she looks up she realizes with a dull start that the rest of Jasper’s family has joined them. 

“Bella!” Esme cries, clearly disturbed by Bella’s appearance when she finally, reluctantly peels herself away from Jasper. “Where were you? We’ve been looking for you for the past half an hour! Are you okay, are you hurt-“

“Someone killed them,” Bella says, shaking. “They’re just- they’re just sitting there in a pile, all out in the open, and I knew I heard something, I knew it, but I didn’t press it because you guys didn’t let me, and now they’re all dead, and I-“

She stops herself, biting her lip so hard the coppery taste of blood fills her mouth.

Esme and Carlisle exchange a worried look.

“Where?” Carlisle asks, voice low and urgent.

Bella’s worried they’re going to make her go back out again, but all Carlisle wants is for her to tell him the general direction where she headed out. Then he, Emmett, Alice, and Edward set out for the scene straight out of a slasher flick, while Jasper, Rosalie, and Esme stay with Bella in the house. She allows herself to be sat down on the couch while Esme fixes her chicken noodle soup, the sound of TV playing low and comforting in the background as Rosalie and Jasper wrap her in blankets and fluff the pillows behind her back. 

Rosalie, to her distant surprise, arranges her so that her head is pillowed on her lap, stroking her hair with an almost maternal air while Jasper squeezes her socked feet gently. Bella’s figured that she’s cried all the tears she has in her, but their caresses- doubled by Esme’s, once she lays down the soup on the table and actually _spoon-feeds_ her, of all things- makes her tear up once more.

“Did you guys call the police?” She hears herself asking after what could’ve been either five minutes or two hours.

“We’re going to,” Jasper says soothingly. “As soon as Carlisle and the others come back.”

Bella sits up abruptly, staring at him with wide, red-rimmed eyes.

“You have to call them now,” Bella says, heart beating wildly in her chest. “The- the guy on top of the pile was killed just a few hours ago; the killer might still be in the woods, you have to call the cops-“

She turns to Esme wildly.

“I told you I heard something in the woods,” she says, and though her voice is terribly accusing, even to herself, she can’t stop the words from spilling from her lips. “I _told _you, and you guys just played it off, and now somebody is _dead, _and you won’t even call the cops!”

“Shh,” Rosalie whispers, easing her head back down onto her lap. “Just let us handle it, okay? Everything’s going to be fine.”

Jasper gives her feet another reassuring squeeze, and a wave of tranquility washes over Bella, so suddenly that she can’t even muster up the energy to argue as Rosalie continues to stroke her hair, and as sleep finally overtakes her.

When she wakes up, it’s late afternoon, and she’s alone. Groaning, her head aching even worse than it had in the early days of her concussion, she wraps a blanket around herself and heads outside, where she hears the muffled sound of police radios and low chatter.

One of her dad’s deputy’s- a pot-bellied, suntanned man in his fifties whose name escapes her for the moment-, looks up from his intense discussion with Carlisle and Esme and waves her over, a warm smile on his face even as cops move around the area in brisk, urgent movements.

“Isabella!” He exclaims, leaning down to give her a big hug. Though Bella dislikes being touched on a good day, especially by strangers, she allows him to nearly break her ribs before moving out of his embrace. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I just saw a dead guy in the middle of the woods,” Bella says, too tired to be anything but needlessly blunt. The deputy nods, if a little uncomfortably.

“I can’t even imagine, Isabella,” he says, and it’s suddenly very clear to her that he probably has at least two or three little kids at home. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that. But hey- you were really brave, do you know that? It was a good thing you found them when you did; we might be able to catch the sick guy who did this faster this way.”

“Or girl.”

“Or girl,” amends the deputy, but Bella can tell he’s just humoring her. Turning to Carlisle, he asks, “Has she spoken with the cops yet, or…?”

Esme wraps a protective arm across Bella’s shoulders.

“There’s nothing she can tell them that they can’t see with their own eyes,” she says firmly, and Bella leans into her touch, immensely grateful. “She went for a quick stroll in the woods, and stumbled across that horror scene in there several minutes in. Then she came back to tell us, that’s all.”

The deputy frowns a little.

“Did you see- or hear- anyone nearby?” He asks, looking back at Bella.

“Nothing,” she says quietly. “There was just me.”

“Well,” the deputy says, rocking back on his heels. “Well. Like I said before, Isabella, I’m awfully sorry you had to see that. And especially after how Charlie’s been faring these past few days, to boot. All our hearts are with you, kiddo.”

Bella stares up at him.

“What about my dad?” She asks slowly. When she glances at Carlisle, his expression is serene as still water, but the way he furtively averts his eyes from hers is resoundingly guilty. The deputy leans back, looking between the two of them with a furrowed brow.

“I should get back to things,” he says, his voice a little too loud. When neither of them look at him, he awkwardly shuffles off to the nearest cruiser, parked on the grass nearby. Bella wraps the blanket tighter around herself, glaring up at Carlisle in earnest.

“What’s wrong with my dad?” She demands.

“It’s a recent development,” Carlisle says quietly. “We only just learned of it today. There’s been an infection in the wound nearest to his left eye, and he’s contracted endophthalmitis. He’s allergic to vancomycin and ceftazidime alike, and since both are needed to treat the issue, we’ve needed to use less potent injections. Hopefully the antibiotics he’s on will allow us to avoid having to perform any unnecessary surgery, but I’m not sure if the alternative medicine he's on will hold up.”

“And if it doesn’t?” Bella asks, disregarding everything save for the words “unnecessary surgery.” 

“We’ll need to perform the vitrectomy as we planned,” Carlisle says, and Bella wants to throttle him for all that he looks like a movie star even as he’s telling her potentially devastating news. He has the apologetic look and gentle tone down to _pat_. “Normally it’s a ninety-percent success rate, but there was already extensive damage to his eye to begin with. There might be retinal tearing, there might be scar-tissue formation, or, in the worst case scenario, blindness.”

“Great,” Bella says, blinking back tears. She’s pissed with Carlisle for not telling her before, but she still feels a little too weak to allow herself to revel in a feeling that isn’t absolute nausea, so instead of tearing into him like she wants, she leans back against Esme’s side. “Could this day be any worse? Is there a dead baby in a trashcan nearby that I should be aware of? Maybe my mom wants to contract some kind of terrible, life-threatening disease?”

Esme and Carlisle exchange a glance over her head.

“You should call her, Bella,” Esme says. “She should know what’s happening with Charlie.”

Bella doesn’t even attempt to suppress the bitter laugh that crawls up her throat.

“Are you kidding?” She asks, pulling away from her. “She doesn’t care. _She’s_ the one who left _him _in the first place.”

“But don’t you think-“

“No,” Bella spits out. “No, I don’t. And I want to go back inside now. If you want to call her yourself, be my guest. Six-oh-two, five-five-four, seven-three-oh-nine. She probably won’t answer the first few times, but I’m sure you’ll be able to figure something out.”

The words come out dripping with unsuppressed vitriol. She’s distantly aware that she’s being more rude to Carlisle than either the present situation or her age allows for, but she can’t bring herself to care as she turns on her heel and storms back into the house without waiting for a response. She doesn’t pause as Alice calls her name from the couch, ducks as Emmett reaches out a hand to touch her shoulder, and narrowly avoids tripping over the ends of her blanket as she sprints up the staircase and into her room, kicking the door shut with a satisfyingly hard slam.

Then she blindly unzips her backpack, grabs her headphones and cassette player, and slams in the first Radiohead tape she sees before squeezing herself under her bed. If this were a movie, she thinks past the sound of wailing guitars and mournful vocals, this scene would be the one moving everyone to tears in the theater right now, but her own performance seems woefully scripted as she stares up at the bottom of her mattress and thinks about nothing at all.


	5. Chapter 5

“Mom,” she begins, wincing as the sound reverberates much too loudly in the quiet of the living room. Her voice sounds shaky and wrong; this is the third voicemail Bella’s left for her, the other two having ended in aborted attempts to explain Charlie’s situation. She woke up early that morning just for this; she was _not_ going to call Renee within earshot of the others, but she might as well have, because she’s going to be up past noon at the rate she’s going.

She’s been- well, not so much _sulking_ as attempting to come to terms with the fact that there’s a serial killer living in the woods outside the Cullen’s house, even more so with the fact that Charlie might end up blind at the other end of Carlisle’s buddies’ knives next week, when the vitrectomy is scheduled to begin.

Her head aches and pounds more so than just after she’d gotten her concussion, and her throat feels perpetually dry- her eyes even more so, despite the fact that she’s been crying herself to sleep for the past two or three nights. It’s been raining nonstop, and despite herself, she can’t help but wish that she was back in Arizona- back in the constant heat, simmering off the cracked asphalt streets of her suburbs, burning the soles of her feet off as she runs across the edge of the community pool and into the shade.

She doesn’t know how to get that through to Renee- the sheer longing for home that feels as though it’s clawing its way up her throat, but she feels as though she has to try, anyway.

_Try again. _

“Mom,” Bella repeats, unsure what she’s going to say until the words tumble from her lips. “Do you remember that summer, when me and you and Dad went to France for break? And how I got food poisoning at that restaurant in Paris, and how I could barely keep down water, and you said that you wished it’d happened to you, and not to me, because ‘God knew how you needed to lose a few pounds?’

“Dad was so pissed with you for saying so in front of me,” she continues, twirling the cord of the landline with her forefinger. “He was worried you were going to give me, like, a complex. But it wasn’t me that developed that eating disorder afterwards. Do you remember that? It was only for a few months, but every time we’d go out with your and Dad’s friends, you’d always excuse yourself to go to the bathroom, and Dad would always have me check on you, to make sure you were okay, but it turns out you were just vomiting. Not because you had food poisoning, like I did. But because you wanted to. Or you had to.

“Dad forced you to see that doctor afterwards,” she says, pausing slightly when she hears the floorboards creak upstairs. It stops after a second, but she lowers her voice regardless. “He threatened to leave you if you didn’t. Before, you complained that he was being dramatic, that what you did with your body was none of his business, but you went to the hospital the second he told you that. I thought about it constantly, afterwards, that you went through weeks and weeks of rehabilitation, because he asked you to, and then you just left him right after that.

“But then I thought that maybe it wasn’t for him that you were doing it- that maybe it was for yourself, and as much as you griped about it, you were actually glad that he told you to do it. Because it meant that somebody cared about you enough to make you stop hurting yourself.”

Her throat clenches up at the memory. She recalls those months as being especially confusing; she must’ve been six or seven at the time, not understanding why Mommy wasn’t living at home anymore, no matter how many times Charlie tried to explain it to her. It must’ve been rough for him, but it was especially hard on her- Renee might’ve been flighty, but she had never been away from Bella longer than a day or two.

“But I never understood why you did it in the first place,” she says, forcing the words past the lump in her throat. “You, who got totally squicked out by basically any bodily function, jammed a finger down your throat and stained your teeth and lost half your weight, and I kept on thinking that it must’ve been my fault. My fault for getting the food poisoning in the first place, for getting that idea into your head. And nobody ever told me it _wasn’t _my fault, and I just-“

Her voice breaks off. She had meant to tell Renee about the murders in the backyard, or that Charlie was supposed have surgery the very next week, or maybe even that Bella wanted to go home, _right_ _now_, and was willing to pay her and Phil off for the plane ticket for the rest of the year, but instead she couldn’t stop talking about something she knew very well that Renee didn’t need a reminder of, not in the early hours of the morning (or whenever she’d listen to this, anyway).

“I know,” Bella says, trying to get her voice back under control, “that your six-year-old kid wasn’t the root cause of your bulimia, or whatever, but I never heard it said out loud. You never told me, and neither did Dad. And by the time I wanted to talk about it, we were already in Arizona and you were already married to Phil, and you were happier than I’d ever seen you before, and I didn’t want to bring it up, but I, um, I think I need you to tell me now. That it wasn’t my fault. Because between what happened to you and what happened to Dad, I think I’m this close-“ and here she makes a pinching sign with her thumb and forefinger, though she knows that Renee can’t exactly see it- “to completely going off the deep end. I just feel like it’s all my fault, you know? I keep on thinking and thinking and thinking, and I can’t sleep at night anymore, and I can’t eat without wanting to throw up, and I feel constantly short of breath, and I think I’m really, actually going ins-“

She stops herself. She can’t send this to Renee. Quickly, she jams her thumb on the pound button on the receiver and attempts to rerecord, but before she can get another word out she hears footsteps on the staircase and immediately slams down the receiver so hard, she’s worried that she might’ve broken it. A few seconds later, and Alice comes wandering into view, spotting Bella sitting tensely on the couch.

“Bella!” Alice says, and though her voice is chipper as always, her face looks uncharacteristically pinched with worry. “What are you doing up so early?”

Bella gives a listless shrug. Most of her energy went into constructing that voicemail; she feels drained, all of a sudden, wanting nothing more than to go back upstairs and crawl back into bed.

“Couldn’t sleep,” she says shortly. Alice eyes her for a second, and though Bella’s had this revelation many times over, she thinks that Alice is so pretty right now, her slender hand placed on the side of the wall as she speaks. She can’t imagine what she looks like in contrast- probably all puffy eyes and sallow skin and tangled hair.

As if reading her thoughts, Alice asks, “Do you want me to do your hair? I didn’t think I got the chance to tell you before, but it’s so lovely. It reminds me of my own hair when I was around your age, all long and soft. I haven’t had long hair in several decades, but it compliments you.”

Bella huffs out a laugh. There’s nothing ‘lovely’ about her hair, mousy brown and so fine she’s constantly worried a hard tug with a hairbrush will render her half-bald. It’s weird to think about Alice- Alice, who has the most fascinating spiky hair that Bella’s sure would never look good on her, but goddamn if she doesn’t want to try-, having any sort of feature that would be considered unremarkable.

Still, she doesn’t want to be contrarian- especially after these past few days-, so she nods her head in acquiescence. Alice’s entire face lights up, and she doesn’t hesitate in grabbing Bella’s wrists and hoisting her off the couch in one strong tug.

“I’ll braid it and everything,” Alice tells her cheerfully as they climb the staircase. “Oh, it’ll be such fun!”

“Sure,” Bella agrees dully, and either Alice doesn’t hear the monotone sound of her voice or is ignoring it entirely, because she readjusts her grip on Bella’s wrists to grab her hand and lead her to her bedroom with a pep in her step that seems a bit much, even for Alice.

Though she’s been living with the Cullens for a while now, she’s never seen the inside of Alice’s room, and is unsurprised to see the absurd amount of fairy lights hung up around her white-oak vanity and canopy bed, wispy blue curtains hanging from the intricately detailed poles that Bella immediately feels compelled to grab in either hand and rip away.

“Let’s sit on the floor,” chirps Alice. “Like a real sleepover.”

Bella dutifully falls onto the soft white rug in the center of the room, her legs crossed criss-cross applesauce beneath her as she absently pulls tufts of fur off the rug. Alice busies herself with her brush and little jars of coconut oil and other assorted hair creams before unceremoniously dropping it on the rug in front of Bella.

“One braid or two?” asks Alice as she sits down on the rug, her back suddenly rod-straight as she reverts into what Bella monikers “professional mode”- truly the antithesis to Alice’s entire personality, but hey, whatever gets her in the hairdressing mood.

“Two,” Bella says, after a pause. Renee used to put her hair into two braids when she was younger, and she’d go around skipping everywhere just to feel the braids bouncing against her back. Alice instructs her to turn around before setting to work, her brush running through Bella’s locks effortlessly despite the many tangles in Bella’s hair, and despite herself, she feels her muscles relax as she leans back against Alice, her eyes fluttering shut. It’s been a while since anybody’s touched her hair, and the gentle, repetitive motions of the brush against her scalp is soothing enough to make her fall half-asleep.

“So,” says Alice, after a while, and though her voice is quiet, there’s an intent underlying in her tone that makes Bella snap to attention, immediately wary. “Having trouble sleeping, Bella?”

“It’s not everyday you stumble upon a scene from _Saw_,” Bella says, and though she’s aiming for sardonic, her tone falls just short of listless. “I don’t know, I guess I’m just- just homesick or something. I miss Arizona.”

“I’ve never been,” Alice says, her voice wistful. “Even if I wanted to, I don’t think I could.”

“What? Why?”

“Pass me the jar of coconut oil, please,” says Alice, deftly avoiding the question. Bella frowns but follows suit, her line of questioning promptly forgotten as Alice begins to massage the oil into her scalp. “Would you describe it for me, Bella?”

“Uh, sure, I guess. What do you want to know?”

“Well, who were your friends?” Alice asks, and though the question is innocent enough, Bella blanks at any possible answer she could give. She didn’t exactly have many friends, aside from the two or three girls she sat with at lunch, and aside from them and Renee, interactions with others were avoided with the same urgency that a vampire had in avoiding the sun.

“Next question, please,” Bella mutters under her breath.

“What did you do for fun?” Alice asks, not losing her momentum.

“Pool,” is Bella’s immediate response. “Movie theater. Roller skating. I actually did, um, ballet up until a few years ago.”

“Ballet?” Alice asks, sounding vaguely shocked, and Bella huffs out a laugh at her reaction.

“My mom forced me to,” she explains. “I hated it. Mom stopped going with me after a while- the ballet studio was only a few blocks away from our house-, and I just didn’t go after that. It took months for her to realize that I wasn’t attending lessons, because I’d go home before the lessons were supposed to end and delete all the voicemails my teacher left for her. She was so pis- upset with me when she found out, but by that point, I couldn’t care less.”

“Why was she so insistent that you go to ballet lessons, when it was obvious you didn’t want to?" asks Alice, genuine curiosity in her voice, and Bella huffs out a laugh. It figures- Alice’s only reference at motherhood is Esme, who, from what Bella can see, is the type of mom to have sent all her kids off with half a dozen Cosmic Brownies in their lunch-pails and been an avid member of the PTA.

“I think she wanted me to be more feminine or something,” Bella says, shrugging her shoulders uncomfortably. “She didn’t get why I hated it so much, but I did. I don’t know why.”

“So what would you do when you were supposed to be going to ballet lessons?” is Alice’s promptly delivered question, and Bella can’t help but smile. Alice’s curiosity is flattering, though she’s probably just humoring Bella.

“I’d go to the library,” Bella says, closing her eyes. She can see the Cholla Library vividly like this, the exposed rafters above her head, air conditioning on full blast to the point where she’d have to lay down her book and go outside, basking in the heat of the sun before that became uncomfortable in its own right. “And I’d sit there until it was time to go back home.”

Alice hums her acknowledgment before they lapse into silence. It’s a comfortable silence, which makes Bella immediately wary. She hasn’t had one of those in a good, long while, and despite herself, she can’t help but blurt the first thing that comes to mind.

“Did they identify the guy yet?”

Alice pauses for a moment behind her. 

“The guy?” She repeats. Bella resists the urge to roll her eyes; it’s not Alice’s fault she’s being vague, but it’s also not really her fault that the phrase “dead guy in the woods I found yesterday” isn’t something she wants to say aloud.

“From the woods,” Bella adds, when it becomes clear that Alice isn’t catching on.

“Oh, that guy,” Alice says, and it would be been funny had it not been for the mountain of gore that flashes across Bella’s eyes when she blinks. She jolts, and the movement causes Alice’s brush to accidentally tear across her scalp in a jagged movement.

Bella cries out, rubbing at the sore spot of her skull, and Alice pulls her against her chest immediately.

“I’m so sorry, Bella!” Alice gasps, and though her arms are freezing where they’re wrapped around Bella’s torso, the chill biting even through her T-shirt, she lets Alice hold her for a moment, the pain slowly receding as Alice’s clutch on her tightens. “I should’ve been more careful, are you okay? Did I make your concussion worse?”

“Fine,” Bella manages to rasp out. “I’m fine.”

Alice slowly detaches herself from Bella, who has to stop herself from doing something immensely embarrassing like leaning back into her touch.

“They’re still attempting to identify him,” Alice admits, lowering the brush beside Bella so she can begin the process of braiding. “Carlisle says they think he might be a drifter from out-of-state, though they’re looking at missing persons’ cases in Port Angeles. He could be anyone, really. It’s too early to tell.”

“If my dad wasn’t hurt, he would’ve found out by now,” Bella says, sounding more confident than she feels. Really, she can’t begin to guess whether Charlie would’ve cracked the case by now; she’d spent only a handful of hours with him this summer before the bear attack, but she feels compelled to vouch for his crime-cracking abilities regardless. “Aren’t you scared at all? That the killer’s still-“

She stops herself, but Alice picks up on her hesitation immediately.

“Still what?”

“Out there,” whispers Bella, feeling foolish even as she says it. She’s not exactly an expert on how to get away with murder, but she’s sure that sticking around the crime scene you created isn’t on a killer’s agenda. “Just- just lurking in the woods. Being sinister.”

“Well, Carlisle and Esme probably aren’t going to let you out of the house for the next several weeks,” says Alice matter-of-factly, long arm reaching out in front of Bella to grab a nearby hair tie. “At least until they have some sort of suspect list.”

“Why only me?” Bella frowns. Alice’s fingers deftly tie up the loose ends of Bella’s braid before setting to work on the next half of hair, the cold of her fingers pressing against her scalp long after they reach the end of her hair. “Why aren’t you guys disallowed from leaving the house?”

“Bella, you’re just a kid,” Alice says, grabbing another hair tie as she speaks. “If something were to happen to you, and we weren’t there to stop it…”

“If the killer’s still out there, you wouldn’t be able to lift a finger against them,” Bella says sulkily, moving away from Alice as soon as she ties up the second braid to face her. Alice bites her lip. “I don’t want to be trapped in this house for the next month doing nothing.”

“There’s plenty of things to do in this house,” Alice retaliates, leaning over to brush a stray lock of hair out of Bella’s eyes. “You said you’d go to the library to read during ballet lessons, right? Carlisle has a thousand books in his office; you could go ask him if you can take some to you room to read. Or you can read them there- I’m sure he’d love the company. The rest of us get antsy too easily, so we don’t make for very good company.”

Bella tries to imagine curling up in an armchair, reading some hundred-year-old tome as Carlisle _clack-clack-clacks_ on his computer, and fails.

“I don’t know. Can’t I just go into the town library?”

Alice’s laugh is bell-like and sweet as it rings around the room, but Bella’s impervious to its infectiousness as she stares at Alice, arms crossed against her chest.

“Bella, it’s an hour-long walk into town from here, and your concussion isn’t going to go away if you constantly jostle your head.”

“But you and Emmett taught me how to bike just the other day,” Bella points out. Alice sucks in a breath through their teeth.

“We probably shouldn’t have, honestly,” Alice tells her. “You have to be careful, Bella. I promise I’ll go with you into town once your concussion heals, but for now I think it’d be best if you just take it easy and try not to overexert yourself.”

“Okay, cool,” Bella says, as sarcastically as she can muster, before getting to her feet. The abrupt movement _does_ hurt her head a little, but she’ll be damned if she lets Alice see that her worries are justified. “So I guess when the murderer breaks into the house and I’m forced to run for my life, I’ll have to run really, really carefully so I can avoid ‘jostling my head.’”

“The murderer isn’t going to break into this house, Bella,” Alice says gently, reaching up to her, but Bella turns on her heel and walks out the door before she can, muttering a ‘thank you’ that sounds insincere even to her own ears. She feels like an ungrateful asshole as she trudges down the hallway, but she feels her frustration bubbling inside of her, threatening to burst forth, and she’d rather be away from Alice when the urge to punch the first thing she sees hits. She digs her nails into her palms instead as she walks downstairs, stopping just short of drawing blood, and wanders into the kitchen, where she can hear muted voices.

Esme and Carlisle are sitting at the little breakfast nook in the corner, but when they see Bella they immediately fall silent, backs straightening like little kids caught with their hands in the cookie jar. Bella hovers awkwardly by the doorway, until Esme finally takes pity on her and says, “Good morning, Bella. I like your braids, did Alice do them?”

“Uh, yeah,” Bella says, and they lapse into an uncomfortable silence until Esme says, “Sorry, did you want something to eat? I haven’t started breakfast yet, but I can make scrambled eggs, or-“

“No, that’s- I mean, I’m okay,” Bella tells her, rubbing the back of her neck. “Um, I thought I’d just get a granola bar or Pop-Tart or something.”

Esme blinks.

“Pop-Tart?” She repeats, the words sounding unfamiliar and strange in her mouth. Bella gives her a weird look.

“Yeah, like the ones you put in the toaster oven?” She prompts, but Esme still has that perplexed look on her face. Whatever, she can deal with Esme’s health-nuttiness interfering with common knowledge of breakfast foods later. For now-

“What were you guys talking about?” Bella asks, taking a seat in the empty chair beside them. “Alice says they still don’t know who the dead guy is; did they update you on anything?”

Esme and Carlisle share a quick, barely perceptible glance.

“They have,” says Esme, slowly. “But not on his identity.”

“What, then?” Bella asks, trying unsuccessfully to stamp down the eagerness in her voice as she leans forward. Carlisle lets out a heavy sigh.

“Apparently,” he says, “the coroner’s report states that the man had been entirely drained of blood.”

The silence that follows is deafening. Bella stares at him, but his face remains stoic and grave, perfect marble features never so inhumanly defined and shapely as they are right now.

“You’re kidding me,” Bella says finally, aiming at incredulous but falling in the definitive realm of the unsure. “Like a vampire or something?”

“Or something,” says Emmett’s voice from behind her. When she turns around, Emmett’s in the threshold of the kitchen, arms braced against the doorframe above his head. “Turns out our little serial killer likes to bleed out his victims. Who would’ve thought?”

“Emmett,” comes out, sharp as a whip, from Esme’s lips. “Don’t.”

“I’m not a kid, you know,” says Bella, the anger coming to a simmer inside her chest. “And I’m not stupid, either. I want to know what’s happening.”

“That’s all they know so far,” Carlisle says, apologetic but firm. “I’m sorry, Bella. I wish we had more to tell you.”

Bella lets out an incredulous little laugh as she slumps back in her chair.

“Figures,” She says, shaking her head, but the anger ebbs as quickly as it came. “I’m sorry, too. This isn’t your fault. I know you’re probably under a lot of pressure right now, and me being bitter and gross isn’t helping anyone.”

“It’s okay, Bella,” Esme says, leaning across the table to pat her hand. “You have more reason than the rest of us to be upset. What you saw was traumatizing.”

“Yeah, well…” Bella trails off, shrugging uncomfortably as three pairs of eyes suddenly fixate on her. Suddenly eager for a distraction, she says, “Actually, I am pretty hungry. Can I still take you up on your offer for eggs?”

Esme beams, as though nothing in this world could make her happier than pouring cracking eggs in a pan. It’s both endearing and extremely weird, Bella thinks as she watches Esme busy herself with the pan and the olive oil and the eggs.

And then, without warning, Esme lets out a little shriek.

Carlisle and Emmett are at her side before Bella can even blink, grabbing either side of her shoulder as they move her away from the pan. At first, Bella thinks she must’ve accidentally gotten some hot oil on herself, but as she gets closer, she sees what made Esme scream like that.

The eggs are fertilized.

"I'm sorry," Esme gasps, staring at the small, barely-developed chicken fetuses in her no-stick pan. "I'm sorry. That just gave me a bit of a fright. I'm afraid I'll have to make you something else, Bella- French toast, perhaps?"

"No thanks," Bella says faintly. "I'm not really hungry anymore."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> aaand she's back, ladies and gentlemen! sorry for the seriously delayed update- i began summer school this week and classes are beating the ever-living shit out of my ass rn-, but hopefully i'll have another chapter up by the end of this week. until then, please indulge w/ me in my deeply-rooted fear of cracking eggs and seeing that they're actually fertilized :)))


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